The community-maintained Arch wiki is an excellent resource and should be consulted for issues first. The IRC channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/#archlinux), and the forums are also available if the answer cannot be found elsewhere. Also, be sure to check out the man pages for any command you are unfamiliar with; this can usually be invoked with man command.

Download

A single image is provided which can be booted into an i686 and x86_64 live system to install Arch Linux over the network. Media containing the [core] repository are no longer provided.

Install images are signed and it is highly recommended to verify their signature before use: this can be done by downloading the .sig file from the download page (or one of the mirrors listed there) to the same directory as the .iso file and then using pacman-key -v iso-file.sig.

The image can be burned to a CD, mounted as an ISO file, or directly written to a USB stick. It is intended for new installations only; an existing Arch Linux system can always be updated with pacman -Syu.

Installation

Keyboard layout

For many countries and keyboard types appropriate keymaps are available already, and a command like loadkeys uk might do what you want. More available keymap files can be found in /usr/share/kbd/keymaps/ (you can omit the keymap path and file extension when using loadkeys).

Format the partitions

Mount the partitions

You must now mount the root partition on /mnt. After that, you should create directories for and mount any other partitions (/mnt/boot, /mnt/home, ...) and mount your swap partition if you want them to be detected by genfstab.

Connect to the internet

A DHCP service is already enabled for all available devices. If you need to setup a static IP or use management tools such as Netctl, you should stop this service first: systemctl stop dhcpcd.service. For more information read configuring network.

Wireless

Install the base system

Before installing, you may want to edit /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist such that your preferred mirror is first. This copy of the mirrorlist will be installed on your new system by pacstrap as well, so it's worth getting it right.

Install and configure a boot loader

Unmount and reboot

If you are still in the chroot environment type exit or press Ctrl+D in order to exit.
Earlier we mounted the partitions under /mnt. In this step we will unmount them:

# umount -R /mnt

Now reboot and then login into the new system with the root account.

Post-installation

User management

Add any user accounts you require besides root, as described in User management. It is not good practice to use the root account for regular use, or expose it via SSH on a server. The root account should only be used for administrative tasks.

Package management

Service management

Arch Linux uses systemd as init, which is a system and service manager for Linux. For maintaining your Arch Linux installation, it is a good idea to learn the basics about it. Interaction with systemd is done through the systemctl command. Read systemd#Basic systemctl usage for more information.

Sound

ALSA usually works out-of-the-box. It just needs to be unmuted. Install alsa-utils (which contains alsamixer) and follow these instructions.

ALSA is included with the kernel and it is recommended. If it does not work, OSS is a viable alternative. If you have advanced audio requirements, take a look at Sound system for an overview of various articles.

Display server

The X Window System (commonly X11, or X) is a networking and display protocol which provides windowing on bitmap displays. It is the de-facto standard for implementating graphical user interfaces. See the Xorg article for details.

Wayland is a new display server protocol and the Weston reference implementation is available. There is very little support for it from applications at this early stage of development.

Fonts

You may wish to install a set of TrueType fonts, as only unscalable bitmap fonts are included by default. DejaVu is a set of high quality, general-purpose fonts with good Unicode coverage:

# pacman -S ttf-dejavu

Refer to Font Configuration for how to configure font rendering and Fonts for font suggestions and installation instructions.